The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  A census carried out by Governor Parke in 1708 shows that the white population of all the English Leeward islands, bar one, had shrunk since the previous census 30 years earlier, most markedly in Nevis, where it was less than a third of its 3,500 earlier population. The exception was Antigua, almost totally undeveloped in 1678, whose white population had grown by 500 to 2,892. Having, uniquely in the Leewards, escaped French invasion, Antigua was now the most important sugar island in the group, and had a slave population just short of 13,000. No one at the beginning of the eighteenth century could call the Leewards settler communities. As in Barbados 20 years before, the gradual transformation to slave society was complete.

  Amazingly, in spite of the destruction, sugar production had doubled in the Leewards during the war, from around 5,000 tons in 1689 to 10,000 in 1713. Worse wars against the French were still to come, but after the Treaty of Utrecht, the Leewards enjoyed a generation of peace. For the islands’ surviving sugar baron families – the Byams, Martins, Gunthorpes, Fryes and, of course, Codringtons – the chance was there to become a colonial sugar aristocracy on the Barbados model.

  19

  THE BECKFORDS: THE NEXT GENERATION

  ‘The Passions of the Mind have a very great power on Mankind here.’

  Sir Hans Sloane on Jamaica, 1707

  In Jamaica, the creation of the most powerful and spectacular sugar dynasty of all was already well under way. By the end of the seventeenth century, Colonel Peter Beckford had upwards of 4,000 acres, he was the factor for the Royal African Company, had widespread shipping and trading interests and, like the Codringtons, looked to combine wealth with political power to the benefit of both. By the late 1690s, Colonel Beckford was President of the Council; furthermore, Governor Beeston, some five years before he left Jamaica in 1702, had obtained for his friend Beckford a commission ‘to succeed to the Government of Jamaica’ should the post become vacant.

  But in the intervening period an incident had occurred that severely damaged the family’s reputation. Beckford’s eldest son Peter, having been educated at Oxford, returned to Jamaica in around 1692, when he was about 19 years old. Nothing is known of his time in England – he made no great impression, as the younger Codrington had done – and he arrived back in Jamaica an unvarnished chip off the old block – headstrong, violent and, as would subsequently be shown, a shrewd and skilful businessman.

  By virtue of his father’s wealth and political power, Peter the Younger quickly assumed a civil position, sworn in as Receiver General in October 1696 ‘on giving the usual security’. But at the end of the following year, on 9 December 1697, Governor Beeston was forced to add an unusual footnote to his customary report to London: ‘This Eve Mr Lewis [the Deputy Judge Advocate] was unfortunately killed by Mr Beckford the Reciever Generall, by which both these offices are at present void but I will endeavour to fill them with the most capable men I can find for them.’

  Lewis had been nearly 60, a venerable age for a white Jamaican. He was a respected and senior member of the establishment, and was not without his own political contacts and influence. Peter the Younger quickly fled Jamaica, first to Hispaniola, then France. According to Lewis’s son-in-law in England, who was soon appealing for justice from the Lords of the Plantations, the murder was ‘barbarous, wilful and forethought’. It had occurred after a quarrel on board one of HM’s ships at anchor in Kingston harbour. Peter had stabbed Lewis, who had ‘immediately dyed (his sword not being drawn out of the scabbard)’. The Beckford family, in turn, was quickly using its influential friends in England to try to downgrade the case to manslaughter. Colonel Beckford even travelled to England in early 1698, in an effort to clear his son’s name.

  In the end, the Lords of the Plantations decided that the case should come to trial in Jamaica. Peter returned to the island, and there was, apparently, a lengthy court case. Details have not survived, but as a writer in Jamaica reported a few years later, ‘To say the Truth, our young Squires are not much afraid of the Courts of Justice.’ Peter seems to have entirely escaped punishment, and was soon back on the rise in Jamaican politics. Clearly the Beckfords were big enough in Jamaica to be above the law. Shortly afterwards, if a subsequent report is to be believed, Colonel Beck-ford’s other son, Thomas, was also tried for murder, but ‘by the interest that was made he … came off too without damage’.

  Yet some of the mud must have stuck. When Governor Beeston returned to England in January 1702, he was replaced not by Colonel Beckford, but by an appointee sent out from England. Having struggled for a short time with the locals, ‘a people very capricious, jealous, and difficult to manage’, this new governor succumbed to fever, and Colonel Beckford had his chance at last.

  On 5 April 1702, Colonel Beckford activated his five-year-old commission and, as curmudgeonly as ever, ‘caused himself to be proclaimed [Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica], saying to the Assembly “I have gone through most of the offices of this Island, though with no great applause, yet without complaint”’. According to his subsequent report to London, the announcement was met ‘without any reluctancye of the people’.

  Others tell a different story. The new Governor and his two violent, firebrand sons were clearly widely feared and, according to one note written to London, ‘generally disliked’. A military commander who was in Jamaica at this time wrote of Colonel Beckford: ‘I have not heard one man speak well of him since I came to the Island.’

  Colonel Beckford served as lieutenant-governor for some eight months, during which his official correspondence reflects the anxieties of the island as a whole: attacks by maroons on isolated settlements; the resumption of war with France, news of which reached Jamaica in July 1702; the lack of troops and ships to defend the island; disruption of trade caused by the swarm of privateers unleashed by the war. He also offered, if reinforcements from England were forthcoming, to lead attacks on the isthmus of Panama and elsewhere (he implied that he had been part of the famous attack by Morgan 30 years earlier). His fellow governor in the Leewards, Christopher Codrington, came in for particular criticism for shipping his French prisoners from St Kitts to nearby Hispaniola: ‘we were served so the last war and felt the unhappy consequence of it’, Beckford wrote to London. In September 1702, Beckford offered to ‘maintain things in a quiet and good posture till H.M. shall be graciously pleased to send over a new Governor, or further powers’.

  But the Lords of the Plantations were already lining up a new permanent governor, perhaps influenced by the letters they had received from Admiral Benbow, the supreme commander in the Caribbean during the early part of the war. According to Benbow, Beckford was doing nothing for the national interest, but everything for his own benefit and that of his fellow sugar barons. Under Beckford, the Admiral wrote, ‘the Government of this Island now is entirely in the hands of the Planters who mind nothing but getting Estates … having no regard to the King’s Interest or Subjects’. ‘The Inhabitants are grown very rich’, Benbow continued, ‘they doe whatever the desire of Gain leads them to without any regard to the Laws of our Country.’ Benbow blamed this in part on the increasing desire of young planters to make a quick fortune and retire back to England or New England while they still had their mental and physical health – their ‘constitutions’ – in one piece.

  On 4 December 1702, Colonel Beckford reluctantly handed over the governorship to Colonel Thomas Handasyd, ‘a brave and resolute officer’, who was deputising for an English earl appointed to the post who declined to take it up. Beckford, promising to be ‘ready … on all occasions to express my duty to her majesty’, returned to the council.

  The loss of the supreme office in the island seems, if anything, to have given a spur to Beckford’s desire for power for his family. In 1704, he arranged for his son Peter to be elected to the assembly for Port Royal; the following year, Peter the Younger was returned by no fewer than three different parishes, choosing to sit for St Elizabeth. His younger brother Thomas soon joined him in the assembly, for w
hich Peter was chosen Speaker in 1707. By this time, his father had brokered a highly advantageous marriage for Peter, to Bathshua, daughter and co-heiress of Colonel Julines Herring, who had settled in Jamaica soon after the English invasion. Their first child was born around 1705–6. By now Peter the Younger was, amongst other public roles, Customs Collector for the island, a position of great influence. His brother Thomas also married an heiress, Mary Ballard, at about this time.

  Their father, the Colonel, was now in his sixties, and in 1705, ‘thro’ the infirmity of his age’, retired from one of his civil positions, Chief Justice of the Island. He remained, though, on the council, much to the exasperation of the Governor, who was fighting a long battle with the islanders to establish his authority and to make them pay for some of their defence. In August 1705, Governor Handasyd wrote a long, despairing letter to London that draws a vivid picture of the Beckfords’ power and methods: ‘I am of opinion I have had a snake in my bosom all this while,’ he wrote, ‘for I do believe all the disturbances that have happened proceeded from Col. Beckford’s family, which has always kept a handkerchief over my eys, under the pretence of friendship, but I have now discovered the deceit.’ But there was little he could do about the influence of the Beckford family. At the end of the following year, complaining once more that the assembly ‘cannot bear English Government, but are still contriving to entrench on H.M. prerogative’, he again identified ‘The chief ffomenters of all this work’ as ‘Col. Beckford and his two sons, whom he has got into the House; they have been both tried for murder, and, I am of opinion, both were guilty, tho the Jury would not find it so’. To the fury of the Governor, the assembly kept electing Peter the Younger as Speaker, and influential friends of the Beckfords in London even had him nominated for the council in early 1709.

  The governor succeeded in blocking Peter the Younger’s rise to the council, but Beckford remained the leading force in the assembly, and, according to the hard-pressed Governor, ‘the chief contriver and promoter of faction and discord’.

  Often this ‘faction and discord’ spilled over into duels and violent armed quarrels, even in the House of Assembly itself. During a late-night session in the assembly on 3 April 1710, Peter Beckford the Younger, then Speaker, was kept by force from adjourning the chamber. The doors were barred and swords drawn. According to the Governor, who was nearby, the assembly members ‘fell into such warm debates … that they put the whole Town into an uproar and murder was cryed out in severall places’. Governor Handasyd then ran ‘with all speed’ towards the Assembly House, encountering on the way the Speaker’s father, Colonel Beckford, who from the nearby council chamber had recognised the voice of his son shouting for help. Colonel Beckford cried out that his son was about to be murdered. Handasyd might not, in truth, have minded such an outcome, but he reassured the old man that he ‘hop’t to God I should come time enough to prevent it’. At that point there was an enormous crash. Sixty-seven-year-old Colonel Beckford had tripped and fallen heavily – possibly down some stairs – ‘by which he dy’d in 2 or 3 minutes, notwithstanding there was severall hundreds of people abt. him, and endeavour’d all they could to bring him to life again, but nothing to the purpose’.

  It is perhaps fitting that Colonel Beckford died during a violent uproar. Nonetheless, he had enjoyed an extremely long life. In the English West Indies at this time, only about three in a hundred of the white population survived beyond the age of 60. He had used this time to amass spectacular wealth, even for a West Indian sugar baron. Reports vary, but he appears to have owned more than 1,000 slaves, had a share in 20 estates and possessed considerable bank stock as well.

  How was such a huge fortune created by one man from virtually nothing? People made money in the West Indies through growing, processing and exporting sugar, of course, but also from marriage alliances, buccaneering, importing wine, spirits and luxury goods, slave-trading, moneylending, raising provisions and livestock, from speculation in land or through lucrative public offices. Several prominent Jamaicans combined three or even four of these activities. But Colonel Peter Beckford did them all. Furthermore, having made his living in his early years on horseback or in a ship’s crew, he had remained ‘very active’ for his whole life, and although he dealt in huge quantities of liquor, he remained, unlike many of his contemporaries, ‘sober’, hard-working and ‘fit’. ‘They who have attained to the greatest age here’, as a commentator on Jamaica wrote some years later, ‘were always early risers, temperate livers in general, inured to moderate exercise, and avoiders of excess in eating.’ This behaviour made Colonel Beckford an exception among West Indian planters.

  Most of the inheritance went to Peter the Younger, who had survived the uproar in the House thanks to the intervention of the Governor, who forced the doors and declared the assembly dissolved in the Queen’s name. Peter did not sit back on top of this fortune, nor retreat to England to mimic the life of a country squire, as some of his contemporaries were starting to do. Like in his father, in Peter the Younger were combined the business acumen of the Draxes and the political opportunism of the Codringtons, together with a violent ruthlessness that was all the Beck-fords’ own. Over the years after his father’s death, Peter acquired a further 3,593 acres in his own name, including, in 1715, nearly 1,000 acres of the wonderfully fertile and well-watered Drax plantation on the north coast.

  The male Drax line had died out in Barbados. Now the Jamaica Draxes saw themselves eclipsed by the unstoppable rise of the Beckfords. Charles Drax, who had inherited the excellent plantation in 1697 and built a Great House, died in 1721, leaving an estate worth about £8,000. Two thirds of this was accounted for by the value of his 300-strong slave force. Like his uncle Henry, he was without a male heir,42 and although his successor would still hold a similar number of slaves in the 1750s, this was a family now on the wane. The rest of the estate was sold to Peter Beckford’s main heir, ‘Alderman’43 William Beckford, in the early 1760s, and would form a super-profitable part of the Beckford sugar empire for Alderman William’s heir, the extraordinary William of Fonthill.

  That the Beckfords, rather than the Draxes (founder barons of the sugar empire), were triumphant in the West Indies offers insights into both lineages. The Drax family, over the generations following the remarkable Sir James, produced less able or ruthless leading sons, whereas from old Colonel Peter Beckford through to his grandson Alderman William and until the disastrous fourth generation born in the mid-eighteenth century, the Beck-fords consistently produced sons even more capable and remorseless than their fathers.

  Several aspects of Charles Drax’s will are striking. The Jamaican Drax Hall, from what we know from archaeology, was certainly grandiose for the island, but the household goods and furniture inside the mansion were valued after Charles’s death at only £213; compared to the Beckfords, this was distinctly frugal and safe. Whether this was from necessity or choice is impossible to say, though the fact that Charles was forced to sell so much land in 1715 points to the former. Drax also had an unusually high percentage of unproductive slaves among his 300-strong inventory – 17 ‘old and lame negro men … eleven old women’. He had 41 ‘boys and girls’ – admittedly ‘hardy’ and therefore working – but no fewer than 77 ‘children’.

  In later years, when the supply of enslaved Africans became much more expensive and problematic, some planters made an effort to encourage their slaves to produce children – who would be born as slaves and belong to their mother’s master – as a way of replenishing their labour force. But in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the opposite was the case. Hard work, cruel treatment, disease and malnutrition among the enslaved women resulted in a very low birth rate. For the typical planter, women were more useful as workers than breeders: small children were considered useless mouths to feed, and the whole business a distraction from the important labouring role of the women. So mothers were forced to work almost right up to full term and driven back to the fields within days of giv
ing birth, where they toiled with their infants strapped to their backs or lying ‘in a furrow, near her, generally to the sun and rain, on a kid skin, or such rags as she can procure’. Very few of the babies survived for long. Tetanus alone, often exacerbated by unhygienic delivery, killed about half of them. Such a ‘young’ community among Drax’s slaves was therefore unusual for his time. In the same way, the proportion of elderly slaves stands out: most rendered unproductive by old age or infirmity were simply worked to death. A slave-trader was told by an Antiguan planter that it was cheaper to drive slaves to the utmost, and by ‘little relaxation, hard fare, and hard usage, to wear them out before they became useless, and unable to do service; and then to buy new ones to fill up their places’.

  It may be too much to conclude from the make-up of Charles Drax’s household that he was entirely atypical in his treatment of his slaves. After all, the inventory also includes three ‘great guns’, seven small arms and four blunderbusses – weapons on site essentially for the white overseers to defend themselves against furious vengeance from the blacks. But there is also a curious bequest in Charles’s will. He designated that a school be established on part of his land, operated out of proceeds of the estate, and ordered that eight poor boys and four poor white girls from St Ann parish were to be taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and the ‘principals and doctrine of the Church of England’. He also specifically requested that a slave named Robinson, from his plantation, was to be admitted into the free school and to be brought up and placed out as ‘one of them’. Upon completion of school, Robinson was to be a free man. If matters had been carried out as specified in his will, it would have been the first free school in Jamaica and most assuredly the first to turn out a free black with a formal education. Over 70 years later, legal action against the later owner of the estate, William Beckford of Fonthill, successfully obtained the necessary funds for the school however, aspects of Drax’s bequest were eliminated. For one thing, its charter formally forbade the admission of blacks.